"50 AI Agents Running My Company" Is a Lie. Here's How I Build It | Gumloop, Max Brodeur-Urbas
In a Nutshell
Max Brodeur-Urbas, founder of Gumloop—an automation platform running 4 million workflows daily for companies like Instacart and Shopify—debunks hype around "50 AI agents running my company" as unreliable slot-machine slop peddled by course sellers, emphasizing that real value comes from deeply understanding a business problem before applying AI to automate repetitive tasks. After quitting Microsoft, surviving a 5-year US deportation ban, and failing 10 ideas, he pivoted from AutoGPT's unreliability to build Gumloop for non-technical users, hitting revenue in YC by focusing obsessively on users, proving ideas wrong quickly, and hiring excited ex-customers. Key advice: automate only what you understand, ignore moat paranoia, build with blind confidence, and prioritize fun culture over forced hustle.
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There's a category of entrepreneurs who think they can build a business with a single click, effortless, because they bought a course with the recipe to making a million dollars a year as a side hustle. There's an anti-pattern with AI where people claim '50 AI agents running my company' or 'a suite of AI that tells me what to do every day.' That's the wrong approach—it's like making a slot machine. Slop, not slot. Everyone on Twitter claims 'I automated everything and work one hour a week and make $10 million on the weekend with my SaaS app.' Most of that is marketing; they're lying. You can sell hope easily, selling a vision of skipping hard work and shortcutting to value, which will never happen. The course sellers make money printing it.
My name is Max, founder and CEO of Gumloop. Gumloop is an automation platform automating about 4 million workflows every day across huge businesses like Instacart, Shopify, DoorDash, Gusto. We're a team of 15, scaling quickly. It lets people who understand a business problem—like marketers, salespeople, or ops—automate their own work instead of speccing it out for engineering.
I went to McGill in Montreal, studied software engineering, did well in school, studied all the time, aimed for best grades. Goal throughout college: get a good job in big tech. Realized quickly I hated it. Common advice is go to big tech to learn then start your own thing—that's cope. Many get golden handcuffs and never leave. I don't think I've used anything learned at Microsoft in my startup. Only value: default respect from the logo on resume, validating competence. Most things I do now are the exact opposite of how Microsoft works.
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